Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.

Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:

Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.